Veteran was there when Truman fired MacArthur
EUGENE – There are moments in history that we are all privy to – moments so ingrained that most of us of a certain age still remember exactly where we were when they happened.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy comes to mind; or when men first walked on the moon; or when the planes hit the Twin Towers.
And even though President Harry Truman’s firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur 65 years ago, on April 11, 1951, might not register in everyone’s memory, Ty Lovelace will never forget it, the Register-Guard reported.
After all, he was there.
There as in right around the corner.
Lovelace, who turned 88 on April 12, said he was in the five-star general’s residence, at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, eating lunch in the kitchen.
MacArthur was eating in the dining room, with his wife, Jean, and their only child, 13-year-old Arthur, when a courier came in with some correspondence, Lovelace recalled.
It was an order from President Harry Truman.
“And I heard the general say (to his wife), ‘Well, we’re finally going home,’” Lovelace recalled in early April, sitting in his apartment at the Crescent Park Senior Living residence in northeast Eugene.
“We’re what?” Lovelace remembered Jean MacArthur saying.
Lovelace, who grew up in Westfir and Eugene, graduated from Eugene High School in 1946, where he was an all-state basketball player for the Axemen’s state championship team that year. He joined the Army in 1948, after a brief stint playing pro basketball in Astoria and Portland in the pre-NBA days.
After basic training at Fort Ord, California, Lovelace shipped out to Osaka, Japan, in 1949 during the post-World War II Allied occupation led by the legendary MacArthur.
Lovelace was later visited by three members of MacArthur’s Honor Guard. They were there to recruit him.
Men in MacArthur’s Honor Guard, of which almost 2,000 served between 1945 and 1951, had to be between 5-foot-10 and 6-foot-2, the latter being Lovelace’s height when he served.
“Criteria for these men were exceptionally high – candidates must have had a good record as a combat soldier, bearing, neatness, thoroughness, character and loyalty,” says the website generalmacarthurshonorguard.com, which lists in alphabetical order all the men who served in the Honor Guard.
‘A strange guy’
Men were handpicked beginning in May 1945 for the Honor Guard, during the closing months of World War II and throughout the Allied occupation of Japan, according to macarthurmemorial.org, a website dedicated to the late general’s memorial in Norfolk, Virginia.
They were enlisted to guard the general’s residence and headquarters and serve him and his family.
Lovelace served in the Honor Guard from September 1949 to January 1952, with the exception of eight months in late 1950 and early 1951 when he fought in the Korean War with the Army’s 1st Raider Company.
He met his wife, Connie, of New York City, a civilian employee at MacArthur’s headquarters in downtown Tokyo, and the two married in August 1951 before returning to Eugene for good in 1952, where they raised four children. She died in 2013 at age 86.
Lovelace remembers “movie nights” with MacArthur, when the men were invited to sit behind him as he watched Westerns and puffed on big cigars, his trademark corncob pipe never seen when not on the battlefield, Lovelace said.
He remembers the big, black Cadillac that ferried MacArthur from his compound 6 miles to his headquarters, and he remembers hitting a button in the bushes that alerted all police stations along the route to clear traffic for the general.
“He was a strange guy,” Lovelace said. “He never talked to any of the GIs.
“I knew the wife better,” he said of Jean MacArthur. She would bring the men lemonade on hot days and they accompanied her on shopping trips.
On April 16, 1951, the MacArthurs flew out of Tokyo to San Francisco – returning to a hero’s welcome and ticker-tape parades throughout the United States – as his Honor Guard stood at salute one last time.
“That’s when it kicked in that he was really gone,” Lovelace said.